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John Patrick's Video Poker: The Complete Guide to Playing and Winning

John Patrick's Video Poker: The Complete Guide to Playing and WinningAuthor: John Patrick
Publisher: Lyle Stuart
Category: Book

List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $3.98
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New (4) Used (15) from $3.96

Seller: bookoutpost
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars 1 reviews
Sales Rank: 763,359

Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9

ISBN: 0818406224
Dewey Decimal Number: 794.8
EAN: 9780818406225
ASIN: 0818406224

Publication Date: September 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Customer Reviews:
1 out of 5 stars Don't buy this book   March 18, 2002
Keith Watt (Phoenix, AZ USA)
17 out of 23 found this review helpful

The author, a self described "professional gambler", simply doesn't understand the game of video poker. While he jokes about being a high school dropout with "street smarts", he unfortunately doesn't understand anything about probability theory or the expected value of return calcultions required to optimize the return on what potentially can be one of the few potentially profitable casino games. In short, his advise on how to play video poker contain many mathemetical errors if optimizing return is your goal.

First he starts by telling you should play table blackjack instead, but if you are too timid to try to learn blackjack, you can minimize your losses by playing video poker his way. He doesn't seem to understand certain video poker games are positive expectation games (unlike blackjack, unless you can track the cards). His advice will quickly turn a positive expectation game (e.g., Duces Wild has a 100.7% expected payback if played flawlessly) into a negative one. One glaring example of his ignorance is "play the minimum for awhile until you see how he machine is paying". The fact is the greatest expected return is achieved by always playing max coins. He doesn't seem to understand each hand is a completely independent event from the prior hand. Some of the hands he says to "hold" are just wrong.

Parting shot: if the author is such as clever professional gambler why does he need to write books like this to make money?


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